


Ruin What Is Pure

by Skullszeyes



Category: The Evil Within (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Torture, Blood and Violence, Child Neglect, Childhood Memories, Childhood Trauma, Gen, Hallucinations, Hearing Voices, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Memories, Mental Anguish, Mental Breakdown, Mental Instability, Mental Link, Psychological Trauma, Repressed Memories, strays away from the canon events
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-07
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2019-10-05 23:37:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17334509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skullszeyes/pseuds/Skullszeyes
Summary: Kidman and Ruvik's memories collided together, and they're forced to relive some of the events of their past.





	1. Collide

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I don't see these two as a romantic couple, maybe a rare pair, I tried getting into it in the DLC's, and maybe I'll explore it in the future. I got the idea because I was quite interested in the insignia that's displayed throughout the first game, and somewhat in the second game. And I was wondering about Ruvik and Kidman's similarities because they are both tied somewhat to Cedar Hill Church. Although it's a bit different because Ruvik is ten ish years older than her (he disappeared when he was 37, and she's 27 in the first game.)
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoy.
> 
> Comments and/or Kudo's are appreciative.

The only time mother was ever affectionate was when she found the necklace.

.

.

.

Kidman stared absently at the mark carved into the walls. Everywhere she goes, she sees it. A testament, a defilement of her memory, of what she was and who she lived with. As if her past is crawling back for her, hoping to drag her into a world she did not want to return too.

STEM had a funny way with the mind, it brought her to places she hoped were buried. All that time working for Mobius, indoctrinated and molded into their subordinate, how come they couldn’t rid this from her mind. Wipe everything clean from when she was young, when she suffered between old wood walls and the creak of the rocking chair her mother sat in.

She glimpsed her shadow several times, heard the familiar creak, and dull humming between cracked lips as Kidman walked through the streets, the same rotten stench of food in the marketplace, mold and wet soil mixing together. It rained and sometimes it leaked in the house, and Kidman would complain about it to her mother, to her father, and she was always closed off from them. Told to return to her room, to sleep. They just wanted her to stop talking, to stop being in front of them, so they could ignore her existence.

Kidman bristled at the thought, at the dismissal. Once she cared, cried, hated and hated as it built up until the day she left. She would have cared for her siblings if they hadn’t fallen into line. All of them, dead in the eyes, waiting for the service to begin. They’d even murmur about it in the house, and taunt her when she didn’t obey.

“Fuck you,” Kidman whispered, not to herself, but to Ruvik. He manipulated the place, and from the looks of her own memories spilling forth upon her, he controlled where she stepped and what she saw. He didn’t show up, and figured he might be a little busy with Sebastian and Joseph, and that gave her time to find Leslie.

The cobbled pathways were similar to Cedar Hill Church. All of it wet, and it didn’t help that she was wearing heels. There was even the smell of fire close by, but the creatures that roamed the place were thick with dried blood from burned flesh around barbed wire digging into their bodies. Their eyes glowed, and they moaned, agonized guttural sounds.

She didn’t have a gun and found a thin metal piece sticking from a fence and pulled on it. The wrenching sounds alerted three in her peripheral vision, coming close with their weapons in hand. Once one got close enough, she slammed the metal piece into the side of their head, their body thrashed as they let out harsh growls. She took their own weapon, which was a hatchet and killed the creature before attacking the other two.

Kidman panted, letting out a shuddered breath as she continued along the road. The smell hadn’t faded, nor did the same pathway, even the woods and fences were all the same.

“I’m going in circles,” she said, annoyed.

A pulse went off and her environment changed, this time she returned to the marketplace, but her memory formed transparent village folk she recognized when she was young. Including herself standing by a vendor holding a small bag of sweet peas that she had bought for her siblings. Their mother rarely fed them, and their father sometimes forgot, but he did give her money to buy a bit that helped their hunger. At least for the night before the morning after they’d start complaining again.

“Why this memory?” she wondered, looking around while her young self was picking the less rotten sweet peas to put into her bag.

Kidman noticed her siblings running after each other with the many children that were left neglected. Children. They always seem to see the world with more brightness than it actually is until they grow older. It was a dark place with dark people, and one had to learn to live in it.

She noticed the change when she spots a man standing at the foot of the entrance that led to the church. He was well dressed in the time period, light hair with a stern face. What was peculiar was the young boy standing beside him with similar features, but the boy was distant toward his father, and was watching the children play. Some had stopped, looking at him before resuming chasing after each other.

“ _Come along, Ruben_ ,” the man said, who seemed to be his father. The boy turned away from the children and followed after him.

Kidman stood in the dark marketplace as every transparent person faded away. Her eyes stayed glued to the path where the father and the boy went. And there was a ripple of shock through her body.

“Ruben?” she said to herself. He came to the village when she was a child. No. That can’t be right, he’s older than her, but she wasn’t entirely sure. She breathed steadily and continued after the two. “Maybe our memories are colliding together.” She didn’t like that thought, nor that Ruben and his father knew of Cedar Hill Church and were quite welcomed to the place.

With each step, the darkness waned and the light grew. The warm air touched her skin, and the heat is exactly how she recalled it. Unbearable. Worse when there was food left out and she’d look at the flies and gnats and think only of disgust. That was her childhood, wasn’t it? Utter disgust for the place she lived in, and what she left behind.

She looked up upon the hill where the church sat. Always so ominous, but self-righteous. It loomed over everything and made her feel small and weak. She wasn’t about to let that stop her. She was older, more prepared, and her past would not scare her.

The father and Ruben appeared before her, they were in conversation behind a man leading them toward the church.

 _“Why couldn’t Laura come with us?”_ Ruben complained, walking in par with his father.

 _“This has nothing to do with your sister,”_ his father spoke, voice harsh and unyielding. It almost sounded like her mother’s when Kidman herself would try to get her to speak, but her mother was adamant with her own selfish decisions.

 _“It has nothing to do with me either,”_ Ruben said.

 _“Ruben, quit it,”_ his father snapped, “ _I told you already, you’re the heir to the Victoriano fortune—”_

_“Laura is older.”_

_“You’re male—”_

_“That makes no sense, it should go to the oldest.”_

His father snarled. _“You’ll understand when you’re older.”_

It seems he finally understood, Kidman thought. Whatever he would’ve become might have been similar to his father.

The environment shifted, an unsettled ripple. She was suddenly inside the church itself. Instead of seeing Ruben with his father, she saw her younger self playing around the empty pews. The entire church itself was empty of people as her younger self hummed and spun in circles.

“You looked familiar.” Kidman twisted around, fingers curling as she caught sight of Ruben at the entrance of the church. Unlike his young version of him, he was older, his white coat burned and concealed his head that was covered in scars, it lingered down his body where even his pants were burned. He regarded her with indifference, but his gaze fell upon the younger version of her. “But I can see now that your memories connected with my own. I know you, inside and out, everything you had gone through, before this moment and after.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Kidman said, keeping her distance from him. “It was the past, might as well get over it.”

He peered at her, as if seeing in her mind, her thoughts. “You’re still troubled, even after Mobius had ripped it out of you. All those desperate times within a white room, question after question, they were the same. You knew it, they knew it, and eventually you caved.” He chuckled. “You became clay for them to mold, an expendable agent.” Kidman furrowed her brows and he caught her confusion. “What, you didn’t expect them to care about you? I can see that neglect, clear as day. Maybe that’s why they consider you pathetic. Easy to manipulate as much as they tried to do so for me.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said, but even her words wobbled, her conviction.

Ruvik smirked, he knew her and it was disturbing. “You played on the grounds of torture and death. Did you know that?” Her young version spun, her arms spread out as she hummed. And she drew close to Ruvik, barely touching him as she moved away.

Kidman grit her teeth. “You already know that answer.” It was unfair that he did. She gripped tight of her pride that was left, knowing even though she was exposed to him, she could still find a way to do her job.

Ruvik scoffed as if he heard her thoughts, felt her feelings towards him and to what she was meant to do. “Maybe you’ll see it my way once you know the truth, Kid.”


	2. Pure Terror

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kidman and Ruvik are following Kidman's younger self, but Kidman is shoved into one of Ruvik's memories.

_It was by accident, she didn’t mean to find it, but there it was. A secret passage within the cemetery. She jumped into the hole, wanting to find its secrets, and the sense of adventure had spurred her on, including the eagerness of finding something more within her small home._

_._

_._

_._

Kidman frowned at her younger self disappearing from her and Ruvik’s eyes. She had kept her distance, but the man was always close, although he didn’t seem to notice that much. He knew she feared him, and he knew she wouldn’t be able to do anything anyway.

“It must’ve been something,” Ruvik said, turning his head to look at her, his eyes hollow of emotion, but his smirk showed his smug interior of what he thought of her and her past, “to find something below your quaint little town.”

“Shut it,” she growled, balling her fists. He knew her memory, and what happened to her, and it enraged her that she was seeing it all again. The fear swelled in her chest as they were pulled down where the sun did not touch the dreadful place below.

It was cold as how she remembered it, and her younger self stepped through her, skimming her hand along the stone where she hadn’t noticed the dried crusted blood and the dampness of the underground cavern.

“I never saw any of this,” Ruvik told her, placing a hand on his hip. “My father didn’t either.”

“Then how do you know?” she asked, watching her younger self, but it slowly came to her that something terrible happened to him. She could feel it in her chest and the way the memory flickered in and out. A heat, unbearable, and the stench of burning flesh.

Kidman cleared her throat and peered at him, a fear of something carved into her chest, but she couldn’t describe what it was. It came from him, an ill-tempered thing that left everything scarred within his mind, all his memories were distorted, and the screaming was always inside his head.

“How?” she whispered, unsure why she can feel this intense pain and knew it was his and his alone.

“We all suffer,” Ruvik said, staring at Kidman’s younger self as she ventured along the corridor, soon to see the horror of what drove Kidman to leave and close her heart off, “that’s what my father said when he locked me down in the basement of my home. All those scars, the pain, everything that wasn’t me became who I am now.” He glanced at her, “we all suffer in our own ways.”

Kidman sneered. “Don’t think this will allow me to sympathize with you. You’ve done worse than I’ve ever have.”

“You stood by—”

“And you haven’t?” she asked, scoffing, “don’t try to play some stupid game with me, you and I both know you don’t care about anyone, all you ever cared about was Lau—” And she was shoved hard against the stone wall, a hand around her neck as Ruvik glared heavily at her.

 _Laura._ She didn’t understand how she knew the name, but it was there on the tip of her tongue. She held it in her hands and felt the flutter of it within her chest, the last warm memory that meant more than anything to Ruvik, that allowed him to live for so long, to do what he had to so he can see his sister again. She was there, alive inside his mind, but Kidman felt the sickness that enveloped her, and it filled her lungs and choked the breath from her throat where Ruvik’s hand tightened.

“She’s...dead,” Kidman managed to say, and Ruvik growled, but he stepped back and Kidman fell onto the floor, gasping for air.  

“She’s not dead,” he told her as he walked away.

Kidman pressed her fingers against her neck where his own had dug into her skin. The marks throbbed and the smell of burned flesh was left behind. Kidman stood up, using the wall to help her. It came to her while he was choking her, memories of him, and because of this, it separated them.

Kidman stood in a small cold square room. There was a door, but it wouldn’t open, and she tried yanking on the knob, but it didn’t give. She turned at a sound and she found a boy kneeling in front of the wall, drawing with a black marker. Most of the ones he asked his father for were dried out from use, he was small with clean clothes and the sickly odor of antiseptic. It was numbing on her tongue and dry on her skin. She blinked a few times at the odd feeling and cursed that she had stepped into one of Ruvik’s memories.

“You’re him,” she said, looking at the boy.

_“Ruben, you have to go to bed.”_

Kidman blinked, glancing around the room and back at Ruben who had sat back on his knees.

“I’m not done,” he said, voice flat.

She furrowed her brows, heart racing as she glanced around, wondering where the voice had come from. Ruben went back to drawing on the wall, and it soon came to her what it was.

“You’re hearing her voice…” she said, unsure of how she was meant to take that. She watched Ruben draw some more, he was meticulous in what he was doing, had sorted everything out before he started.

Kidman noticed the anatomy books lying on the floor, chemistry, and biology. They were advanced books, and a few were left open with his small writing on the side of the pages.

Kidman flinched when she heard a noise coming from the door, and it seemed to have alerted Ruben. He dropped his marker and stood to his feet, he became distressed as the door opened, and Kidman noticed the man with blond hair, he didn’t look at Ruben and was quick to drop a metal tray with food on it and slam the door shut.

Ruben screamed, he gripped the knob, but it was already locked and he started to bang his fists against the door.

“Father, let me out, let me out, let me out!” he panted, gasping for air as he fell to his knees, leaning against the door as tears pricked the sides of his eyes and trailed down his scarred face, still pink and puckered. “Don’t leave me in here, please, don’t go.”

Kidman watched him stay against the door, catching his breath and wiping away his tears.

_Ruben, you have to go to bed._

“I know,” Ruben said, pulling his knees against his chest, “I know, I will, soon.”

Kidman blinked and almost stumbled back at the sight of a young woman standing in the corner of the room. She had long black hair and wore a red dress that hugged her body. She was quite tall, but Kidman figured she was around the age of sixteen or seventeen from her youthful face. She was pretty, but Kidman knew she wasn’t real.

 _“Ruben,”_ she spoke, leaving the corner and coming to his side, _“you know he won’t let you out of the room.”_

Ruben started to cry again, covering his face with his hands as Laura stayed by his side.

 _“I won’t leave you,”_ she said, _“not ever, but it’s time to go to bed.”_

Ruben continued to cry, and Kidman wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do besides watch him pick up the food that his father had dropped on the floor, and place it on the table. He staggered toward the bed and lied down, pulling the blankets over his small shivering body.

Laura knelt down beside his bed, placing a hand on his own, softly cooing him until he fell asleep.

Kidman swallowed the lump in her throat. He went through this, the pain, but for how long? When did it all stop?

Her ear twitched at a soft flickering noise as she turned, but her wrist was grasped and she was yanked out of the memory and back in the corridor where she last saw her younger self. Ruvik shoved her against the wall, glaring at her.

“You weren’t meant to see that,” he said. And she caught the uncomfortable look in his eyes. She had seen a past he wished to repress, but the loneliness and deterioration of his mind is what made him. He can’t entirely destroy it without destroying his meaning in life. Or even shut out Laura’s voice, why would he want that when that’s all he ever wan—

“Stop,” Ruvik said, going back to glaring at her, “thinking.”

Kidman scoffed. “I can’t do that, I’m only assessing what’s happening, and whatever you’ve been thinking is what pulled me into your memory. It’s not my fault that I seen it.”

Ruvik bristled, and looked away from her. “Since you seen my memory, how about we see yours.”

She knew which one he was talking about, and it left her helpless as it came back to her. Once she had shoved it down so hard that she was able to forget about it. But now, she was inside something that allowed her to confront it in an intense way, which she did not want.

Ruvik smiled, listening to her thoughts, to her heart racing, to every fear that pricked along her skin. “Now there’s something I’ve been missing,” he looked to her and grinned, “the taste of pure terror.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey. So I was reading a bit more about Ruvik, and apparently he had schizophrenic hallucinations of Laura, hearing her voice and seeing her. I wanted to write a scene with that, and his trauma living in captivity because of his stupid abusive father. 
> 
> I hoped you enjoyed.
> 
> Comments and/or Kudo's are appreciative.


	3. At Their End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kidman relives a past she hoped to forget, but finds a revelation connecting to her present.

Somehow, this was punishment for the way she lived all these years. It came back to bite her, and more so with a man who talked to his sister in a square room in the basement of his home. His father, completely neglectful raised the hatred within him, stoking the fire without realizing how high the flames licked the air.

Kidman winced at the sounds in her head. Small timid voices and laughter mixed in with his sister’s agonized screams bounced around inside her head. Fragments of a past she wasn’t a part of.

“You were quite naive,” Ruvik interrupted her headache.

“What?” she asked, glaring fruitlessly at him as he walked ahead, but making sure she wasn’t far from hearing his actual present voice.

“Once,” he chuckled, “I can see into your memories, all of it a stain on who you were until Mobius got their hands on you. They did wonders on the memory, even your perception of life and the behavior you were molded into changed. A wild thing, swearing off the top of your lungs, your fists truly met many in a blood splattered reverly. You loved the taste of freedom until they put a leash around your neck and decided to squeeze a bit too hard.”

Kidman rolled her eyes. “You like the sound of your voice,” she said.

“And you like the sound of your own, but who knows if it’s your actual voice, or Mobius’s indoctrination. A white room with no windows, a constant jab of question after question. They wore you down and carved you into their willing subordinate.”

“I don’t enjoy memory lane,” Kidman told him.

“I know,” said Ruvik, enjoying their conversation more than she did.

Kidman swallowed the lump in her throat. The intensity of the air grew, the stench of old and new blood covered the entire recess of the tunnel. The collective childlike and rebellious demeanor slowly came to a crawl as she curled in herself once reality set in.

_“What is this?”_

“What indeed,” Ruvik answered, obviously enjoying him.

Kidman curled her fingers, wishing she done things differently, but maybe what happened was bound to play out one way or another. This was simply the most easier predicament she could’ve found herself in. Learning the truth.

Her younger self, pure in heart, was stained at the fingertips, the dirt noticeable under the flickering light of torches lit on either side of the entrance. She stopped, and Kidman remembered her heart racing inside her chest as she connected the dots to what she was seeing. Her pace eased to a stop, her arms stayed at her sides, but as she and Ruvik stepped around her. The horror was splayed upon her face, her breath leaving her lips in rapid pants.

Fear was too easy to remember, too hard to forget. It stained her hands, her arms, her entire body until even her mind could not be scrubbed clean of it. It was where the seed was planted, the hatred growing inside her formed, but before it could bloom, fear was the root that spread.

 _“No, no, no, no!”_ her voice echoed throughout the chamber as she knelt down, curling into herself, trying her hardest to catch her breath. She couldn’t stop shaking, squeezing her eyes closed and hoping it was all a lie. Except reality was cruel, and it showed you the truth even if you try to deny it.

Her younger self wiped her tears and stood, and what Kidman regretted most was her decision to continue onward. Walking by stone tablets with dead bodies sacrificed upon it, marked with red on the sides. Candles lit the sheer detail of ruptured bone and dry blood. There were even ones who were covered, by the thick stains coming through was evident enough of what it was.

The only thing that was good for her at this point in her life was that she knew no one. She couldn’t put a name to any of the people who died in the chamber. Who were brought there with the expectation for greater things, a church on the hill, white and revealing, yet beneath it was its corruption, and they foolishly were killed.

 _“A cult,”_ her younger self whispered, as if it were a bad word that shouldn’t be uttered, _“they’re a cult.”_

Mother, father, and her siblings, all reeled into the belief of the church. And herself, standing away from everyone where the weeping angel predicted even the cost of the place was damning.

She shrieked as a body moved, thrashing underneath it, screaming out within. She had no idea what to do at the time, but she didn’t touch it. A regret easing inside her, but now she knew if she had opened the bag, she would have ended up dead. They would’ve known what she did, and the man wouldn’t have cared. Most were like that when they wanted to save their own skin.

“Did it scar you?” Ruvik asked, watching her younger self move throughout the room, inspecting the dead things in the bags.

“It left something,” she said. Watching her past replay itself reminded her why she was here. “Taking me down memory lane won’t do you anything. I’ll still find Leslie and bring him to Mobius. That is my mission.”

Ruvik’s eyes bore into her. “Like I said, you’ll see it my way soon.”

“This is bullshit,” Kidman said, stepping toward him but stopped herself. He smiled at her hesitation.

“Don’t think Mobius is the only one counting on him,” Ruvik said.

“Why does he benefit for you?” she asked.

“You’ll see, in time, and maybe even then, it’ll be too late.” He walked toward her younger self, watching as she neared the next tunnel. She hadn’t disturbed the bodies to the point the trap would be set, and she didn’t know there was one as she walked through, her hands stayed away from the walls as cold set against her skin.

Kidman had to find Leslie, not follow her own footsteps through a past she wished was buried.

An elevator sat untouched at the end of the tunnel. Her younger self was cautious of everything she came across, and when she stepped onto the platform, the door closed and her fingers found the mesh.

 _“No, no,”_ she whispered, afraid.

Kidman pitied herself, the fear was too alive in her veins, in her harsh gasping breaths as the door opened once the elevator came to a stop. She experimentally stepped out and headed down the tunnel. It was all one way, no other direction, and covered in a cold darkness, forcing her to touch the walls to help her to the end where an out of place laboratory was.

Much more advanced than her small town. A flickering light lit up a desk where papers were left forgotten, dust covered the top. There were empty containers filled with water. Drawings on the wall of the body and the brain.

“I also questioned the people I was a part of,” Ruvik mused, standing by her younger self who was near the desk.

Kidman carefully joined them. A folder stained with blood was in the hands of her younger self, wiping away the dust and scratching at the blood before pulling her finger way as she dropped the folder.

What caused Kidman to almost stumble back was what was on the front of the folder. She didn’t connect the dots when she was younger, nor when she was brought up into Mobius. A lot happened during the time when she was caught by the police, and later recruited as an agent.

Beacon Mental Hospital was on the right top side of the folder, with its insignia on the left side. In large letters on the front was CONFIDENTIAL.

Her younger self flipped the folder open and it read of a rapid growth of twins. Kidman never heard of any twins before, and it seemed they were locked up and hidden away. A diagram of their bodies as babies and later as giants had stunned her. Her younger self closed the folder, breathing hard at what she read.

 _“Neun and Zehn?”_ she whispered.

Before she could look at more of the documents from Beacon Mental Hospital. A noise came from the tunnel leading to the elevator. Her heart had picked up as she glanced around the room before spotting an exit hidden by the darkness.

She ran up the incline as voices grew behind her, she almost tripped on the stones, keeping herself from yelping in surprise as her fingers found the dirt. She pushed herself up, grasping for the wall before continuing through the tunnel. It was too late for her to register the growling noises as light warmed at the sight once she left the tunnel.

She had turned to the left, sucking in a breath as she stumbled back against the wall. Her legs shaking at the massive thing she was looking at.

 _“What the fuck is that?”_ she asked, voice muffled by her hand. The voices brought her out of her temporary shocked state, and saw no other way. She sprinted toward the dog as it moved at her approach, but the metal mesh fence kept it contained, including the thick chains keeping it down. She ran to the right toward another exit point.

Kidman stayed with her younger self while Ruvik teleported ahead. She knew this is what he was talking about. The terror that changed her life. The fear she tried to ignore and shove down into her mind. It was here where her reasons came to fruition, pushing her over the edge.

Her younger self came to a door, a flickering light shown it had no handle and she banged her fists against it.

“Let me out, let me out, let me out!” Her fists burned at how hard she banged them against the metal surface. Glancing around frantically to find a way out until she noticed the panel. She put her weight on it, and right away, the door rose and she ran through.

There was another tunnel, much wider, but what made her focus more on was the outside. The fresh air instead of the stink of rotting dead bodies and blood. She pushed hard against metal door, knowing it was the one that once made her curious when she didn’t know the truth.

The door was hard to shove open, but she managed to squeeze her thin form through and she was out. Running for the gate to her left, she sprinted home with everything she had known of what was beneath her town.

Kidman and Ruvik watched her disappear, the silence ached between them before they were once more teleported back inside the church. As if nothing else had changed.

“Now that you’ve seen my past, and I’ve seen yours, mind fucking off?” she asked, glaring.

“All I’ve shown you, and you still side with Mobius?” he asked, looking disappointed.

The truth was there, shoved away with the rest of her memory until now.

Kidman shook her head, “It doesn’t change anything, you and I know that.”

“Did it?” he asked. “You only know a part of me, while I know you inside and out. You know something is wrong, but you can’t seem to break out of your indoctrination.”

“No,” she said, “what you showed me is exactly what was wrong with my recruitment. You and I didn’t know what we were getting into. Both of us blinded by our pasts, trying our hardest to run from it, and find a better future. We didn’t know the truth until it was too late.”

They ended up at the beginning of their end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was thinking about this when I started up this short fanfic. Ruvik and Kidman started working with the people who messed with their pasts. Kidman lived with a cult, and Ruvik was burned with his sister by the same people. As adults, they worked for them. The cult has ties with Mobius or are Mobius who own Beacon. (From what I can understand on wiki. lol.)
> 
> I thought it was kind of ironic that what they hate is who they were working for. 
> 
> Comments and/or Kudo's are appreciative.


	4. Motive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ruvik and Kidman talk about what is going to happen next, and what Ruvik was trying to make Kidman understand.

“Where did that truth take us?” Ruvik asked, circling her as Kidman checked her gun, empty clip inside an echoing hall of nothing more than his voice. “Where did it bring us both if it didn’t mean that they orchestrated everything?”

Kidman shook her head, the flashes of memory what he had shown her entered her mind, and she winced, her hand coming to the side of her head. “It’s a past, leave it in the past.”

“They knew,” Ruvik continued, ignoring her, “they knew who we were to them, they knew how to play us before we even figured out their motives. And it was all too late.”

Kidman squeezed her eyes closed. “Who the fuck cares.” She gasped as he stood in front of her, his dry hands gripping her shoulders as he stared into her eyes. 

“I care,” he said in a guttural voice, rage simmering under his patience, “they ruined my life, they took everything away from me, and I didn’t know of their involvement until years later.”

“What involvement?” she asked, glaring right back. 

“They are the ones who did this to me,” Ruvik said. And she couldn’t ignore his fingertips burning into her arms, and she screamed and thrashed, trying to get out of his grasp, but he wouldn’t let go. The entire church was set on fire, but it wasn’t the church, it was a barn, and her screams clung to another. “My darling sister,” he said, softly, “they murdered my sister, they were meant to murder me. I didn’t know, not until after they tore me apart.”

Kidman gasped for air, her own skin was burning off, and when he let go of her. They were back inside the church, but the burns on her arms stayed where he held her. “How would you have known that…”

Ruvik clicked his tongue, disappointment in his eyes. “When it became relevant to them that my machine was theirs to use. They didn’t consider my own ideals, and that... _ sycophant _ ...took more than he should’ve.”

Her shaky fingers touched the sides of her arms. “What does this have to do with Leslie?”

“Everything,” he told her, his anger fell again into indifference as his gaze dragged away from her. “That boy has more importance than you and me, and if MOBIUS gets their hands on him, they’ll have control of this machine.”

Kidman knew what he was telling her was true. She was told this before, and that Ruvik was the ghost in the machine, he was the one who was killing off the subordinates. Yet, he had also worked for them once, and became less of himself besides pure thought and hatred towards what happened to him. 

“If this machine is destroyed” Kidman said, backing away from Ruvik, “then you’ll be destroyed.”

Ruvik smirked, “Do you think they’ll let you destroy STEM. After everything they had invested into it? Why would they bother to let an  _ expendable  _ agent destroy what they’ve been scraping and crawling for?”

Expendable.

“They want Leslie, and so do you,” Kidman said, watching his attention wavering, “but that means you want a way out.”

“And you’ll follow their orders like a good soldier?” he asked her. “After they had ruined your life.”

“Even if I hadn’t gone down there…” she said, the taste on her tongue was dry, yet she could recall the blood, and moving bags and the ones that kept still. She could never get the decay out of her mind, and Ruvik had pulled it to the surface. He didn’t care if it revolted her. She had thanked MOBIUS for pushing those memories back, where she could barely recognize it, and it didn’t matter. 

The past didn’t matter.

“We grow from what we experience.”

Kidman scoffed, “Besides yourself? You’re still grasping for control over this machine because of what happened to you and Laura.” The moment she had said his sister’s name, he began walking towards her, his glare had darkened, becoming unsure of thought beyond the rage rising and rising as the church began to crack along the walls, and the light coming through the windows were no longer there, but dimming as a cluster of clouds hid the sun. 

“What would you tell that scared little girl,” Ruvik began, and Kidman glanced to the side to see her younger self spinning in the church as it began to shake, plaster falling around as she hummed, “about the past she worked to run from is the same she worked with the entire time?”

“Would you tell yourself that too?” she snapped, glaring at Ruvik, hating him for bringing back a part of herself into this. She had tried so hard to never return to the past, and he brought it back to her, to force it in her face, to make her confront what she could barely understand herself until now. 

“We may have made our mistakes to follow the wrong people,” Ruvik said, “but it’s where it brought us, to the truth of what they did. They had torn away what makes us pure.”

“And what does it matter if they did that?” Where was he getting at with this? Why did it matter to him of where she worked at all this time? “My parents neglected me way before I found out about that  _ place _ . It was only a matter of time.”

“Exactly. And now you stand where you stood all those years ago. And you still side with the people who ruined your life, who knows who you are and used you,” Ruvik said. “Just like me, Kid, they knew me as much as I know you. They will use Leslie like they used us—”

“It doesn’t change your motives.”

“Doesn’t it?” he asked her.

She was sure of who he was inside that room as a boy. He was the one who had lost everything right before his eyes. His melted skin, and screams within an echoed room, locked from the light, and the warmth of his parents who had supposedly loved him. And in all that, he had also lost his sister. 

“You want her back,” Kidman said, realizing what he was going to do as the pieces fell into place. “That’s why you want Leslie.”

Ruvik said nothing, and she had guessed right. 

She gritted her teeth, resolving herself as she said, “I won’t let you take him.”

“And what about MOBIUS? They will also take him for the exact same reasons as me. So they can use STEM for their own purposes.”

She was pulled in one direction and the next. Her loyalty to MOBIUS, and her confliction with Ruvik. He was right in some way that she worked with the same people who had tortured—

Kidman peered at her younger self, and she wanted to protect the girl that had seen horror too early in life. She spun inside the room as more plaster fell around her. Easily going through her arms and shoulders, but she continued humming as her eyes were closed shut. 

Pure. 

Where did it begin? 

Children weren’t pure. Her mother told her that when she had taken the necklace, and the slap to the face burned longer than her tears. It wasn’t pure when she played in the grave yard. When she pranked the village folk, and kept away from the kids, and ignored her siblings. She hated them with everything inside her body, and it had grown like a disease in her mind.

Leaving that dreadful place held no remorse inside her heart that was once feeble, and now grown walls to keep anyone from ever getting close.

The only time she felt relief was when MOBIUS had saved her from those terrible memories. She had been troubled before they found her. She did everything to take away the pain of what she had seen. 

And when people she didn’t know would threaten her life. She’d know that she had seen worse than anything else they ever seen in their lives. That she had stood in front of death and decay. She had smelled blood and ruin, and the pained moans of the dying in a damp place hidden by metal. 

She had seen more than she would’ve thought, but wandering the mind of a psychopath was another thing she hadn’t thought she’d experience. Nor think he would bring back a part of her past she thought was buried. 

MOBIUS saved her.

They had saved her.

Because they knew who she was and weren’t about to tell her how. They kept their secrets close, and they had given her more than her parents ever gave her. It was not love, but it was comfort, and it was good enough for her.

Now she stood in front of someone who had the same thing as she did. He gave them everything, and yet they had taken  _ everything  _ from him. 

“I won’t let you take him,” Kidman said to Ruvik, and she didn’t glare at him when she met his eyes, “I won’t let  _ them  _ take him either.”

Ruvik smiled, “I wonder if you understand what he can do for them, and what they’ll do to  _ you  _ once they learn about this insubordination.” And he disappeared from the church, and she was left with the cracks upon the walls, and the dim light coming through from the separating clouds. 

Kidman walked toward the podium where her younger self now stood. She looked upon the empty pews, and wore a smile on her face. A smile that was long forgotten.

She frowned, reaching out until her young self began to fade away, and she was left truly alone inside the church. Kidman placed her hand on the podium, and closed her eyes.

They had destroyed her life, just like they had destroyed Ruvik’s. It was only a matter of time. 

“Ruin...what is pure,” Kidman whispered. 

Kidman turned away from the podium and walked back toward the entrance of the church. She glanced down at a clip lying before the door and she picked it up, took out her gun, and loaded it. She gave a deep breath, and walked out. 

Her goal didn’t change, but her motive did. 

She had to find Leslie before MOBIUS did, he was the last pure thing in this machine that she didn’t want anymore corrupted like the rest of them. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was meant to be a short fic back in Jan. However, some thing's were happening, and I forgot about this story, and then I lost what I wanted to write for the ending and decided to ignore until now. But here I am, and I hope this suffices. :) 
> 
> Tbh, I actually did forget why I wanted to write this story. My notes were on my phone, and they are gone. And I didn't write them down in my notebook, and it was annoying. So, hopefully this is fine...I hope.
> 
> Comments and/or Kudo's are appreciative.


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